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Sunday, November 17, 2013

B.A. Shapiro's The Art Forger is a fun thriller about a piece of art that was stolen as part of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist. For those of you that don't know the story, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a gem of a museum in Boston located in a charming old mansion. The works that populate the Museum are the collection of a rich eccentric and ardent art collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner, who established the museum in 1903. In 1990 thieves dressed as Boston police officers entered the Museum and stole 13 art works (including works by Rembrandt, Manet, Degas, Vermeer). For decades the robbery went unsolved - just this year the FBI announced they knew who the thieves were, but the location of the stolen art remain undiscovered. Here in Boston this theft has been the stuff of urban legend - with rumors swirling that Whitey Bulger was behind the theft. With this backdrop, B.A. Shapiro creates a fictional account of one woman's connection to a work allegedly stolen as part of that heist (a fictional painting by Degas entitled "After the Bath). The novel's heroine, Claire Roth, is a struggling artist who has been blackballed by the art world because of a scandal in her past. To make ends meet she does copies of Degas paintings for a website called "reproductions.com". One day a sexy and successful art dealer, Aiden Markel, asks her to make a reproduction of one of the Degas' stolen in the Gardner heist - in return she will get a lot of money and more importantly a one woman show at his gallery. From here Shapiro quickly sweeps the reader into a suspenseful and interesting mystery. An explanation of the pad thai, pictured above, after the jump and below.